Paul's blog

This is a copy of two separately posted messages, some three weeks ago, from my previous Livejournal blog, in which I wrote under the name of ‘Dutchdoc’ (‘Dutch’ should be obvious, ‘Doc’, because Grumpy and Dopey were already taken, or so the story goes).

I’ll explain the reason for re-posting this later.

It was somewhere in February 2005.
A true story.
I was in line at the security checkpoint at Melbourne (Florida!) Airport. After a stopover in Atlanta, I would soon be on a transatlantic flight.
In front of me, at the security checkpoint, were four guys who were very obviously traveling together.
I estimated them to be in their mid-twenties, conservatively dressed and clearly from Middle Eastern descent. Well.. Middle East.. they could have been Afghani or Pakistani too. But you know what I mean. NOT a group of four guys you want to see board YOUR plane! I mean.. four guys with blond hair and blue eyes… sure… But this.. MAYBE not!
Understandably they were VERY closely scrutinized by the security folks. Every single one of them had their carry-on luggage hand searched, were thoroughly frisked and even had to take apart their cell phones. On top of that: they were treated RUDELY! Barked at. Two of them were visibly angered by the whole ordeal and the other two just giggled. But all four of them endured the whole thing remarkably patiently.
Was this profiling? Of COURSE it was. And I have to admit, legal or not, I don’t care! Profiling, despite being racist, in a way, simply makes sense.
Does that make me a racist? I don’t think so. Just careful. It’s all a matter of statistics.
Anyway.
As I now know, the first names of these four Pakistani-looking 25 year olds were: (8/29: names removed. No longer relevant to the story, besides I shouldn’t have used their real names, especially not in this context).
What was NOT obvious about this whole thing was that there was actually a fifth member traveling in this group.
He followed the four from a distance, watched with interest when they were being frisked, barely noticeably shook his head, smiled, joked with the security officer when he put his THREE laptops on the conveyor belt, and was waved through without any further incident.
I remember thinking: THREE laptops, isn’t that a bit suspicious?
Apparently, it wasn’t.
The five of them would fly to Paris.
And from there, according to their tickets, on to New Delhi.
As for the name of this fifth guy, let me just suffice by giving you his ‘code’ name…

(to be continued…)

And a few days later I posted the rest of the story …

Frightflight II

The (not-so)fright flight saga continues …

As mentioned in the first part of this story, the mystery fifth member of this group was waved through the security checkpoint without any incident.
One may have wondered about this, since I clearly mentioned that the security folks were heavily profiling!
There was a reason the fifth guy wasn’t bothered:
He was blond and had blue eyes.
And his code name, that I promised to reveal, was ‘Dutchdoc’.

And before you fearfully and astonished ask me ‘Are YOU a terrorist? We had NO idea!” .. no, of course I’m not a terorrist. Nor were my 4 companions terrorists.

They were just four co-workers from our software design center in Noida, India, (I have now removed their names from the first part of the story: I didn’t feel comfortable using their real names), who worked here in Palm Bay for a few weeks with some of my team’s members on various issues.
They were returning home, and I travelled with them to attend a design review meeting at said development center.
As for the reason for telling this story I have to add this: some of my Indian co-workers had purchased some electronics gadgets here like games, portable dvd-player and cell phones -yeah, I guess we pay them too much ;-)-. They were very thrilled about this and while we were seated, waiting for the plane to take off, they were showing eachother stuff, handing the gadgets back and forth, pointing, giggling and overall being very excited.

Nobody seemed to care and nobody asked them to quit doing that.
HAD someone told them to stop passing these gadgets around, chances would have been that some of them wouldn’t have immediately realized what was being asked of them: Their English is, well, while better than mine, slightly different from what’s commonly used here in the US.

Since I have SEEN this, I IMMEDIATELY knew what happened when I read the first stories of Northwest flight 42 that returned to Amsterdam after some passengers ‘displayed behavior of concern’ (passing around cell phones).

Again: security theatre!
I can understand that the onboard Air Marshall (yes, there was one) was alerted by this and payed some attention to it.
Had he DONE this calmly and without panicking, I’m almost SURE he would have recognized the innocent nature of the whole thing.
But to recommend to the captain to return IS panicking. (And I won’t even go into the absurdity of the Dutch police holding and questioning these 12(!) kids for TWO days, without realizing these guys were just passing around gadgets).

I guess this is all a matter of training.

The security theatre is becoming rampant. Last Saturday there were SIX flights being diverted here in the US, one for something silly as a woman filing her nails!

We need better training for air marshalls and cabin crew:

– If a guy tries to set his shoe on fire: sure, take him down.
– If a woman doesn’t realize you’re serious when you tell her to quit filing her nails .. diverting the flight is over-reacting.
– If a an elderly American woman goes to the bathroom ‘too often’ .. NOT a reason for TWO airmarshalls to tackle her and make the plane land.
– If you find dynamite in someone’s luggage: yes, that’s a reason for concern and requires some investigation.
– Taking someone into custody for bringing two tubes of toothpaste on a plane .. you need training! (What’s wrong with holding on to the toothpaste and returning it after the flight).